The art and craft of Kali Patton - specializing in monster-ously cute plush and accessories.

2 posts categorized "Gardening"

July 20, 2011

Last week I popped out to my garden to pick some of the jalapenos that were ripe. They've done insanely well this year and even though I only planted two plants there were dozens of peppers ready to be picked. As I made my way through the plants I noticed one pepper towards the top of one of the the plants that had been chewed. Half of it was completely gone. It was a pretty large pepper and I have a fence wrapping all the way around the garden to keep bunnies, and other small animals out. While I paused to try to figure out what could have eaten the pepper I saw something move out of the corner of my eye.

It was a tomato worm. The largest tomato worm I have ever seen.

It was as wide around as my middle finger and 1.5x as long. I instantly dropped all of my peppers and ran screaming into the house where I proceeded to lock the door and jump around in frantic circles. Not one of my finer moments.

I'm all for reptiles and I appreciate a bug at a distance as well as the next guy, but caterpillars and worms I just don't do. The round squishiness makes me cringe. I get nauseous watching them move. Ugh, *shiver of disgust* just thinking about it grosses me out. As bad as they are alive, I would imagine squashing one would be even more disgusting.

The hand pictured in the photos belongs to my friend Chris. He was kind enough to stop by my house and remove the worm from my pepper plant. It was then relocated to my neighbors front yard safely out of range of my garden.

Do you see how there is a large segment of body towards the front of the caterpillar without any legs, allowing it to rear up in a terrifying manor? Well that's what it was doing when I first noticed it. It saw me first, reared up all creepy like, and then turned to look at me. Gah! It had a face! With real facial features! It looked like a green alien shar pei with swollen jowls. Gag. The memory of it has kept me out of my garden all this week. I might consider going back next week. Maybe, but not without back up.

April 20, 2011

The weather has been so unpredictable recently. 80 degrees one day and then 40 the next. Yesterday was hot and humid during the day before it abruptly shifted to freezing rain with golf ball sized hail in the evening. I've taken to keeping a jacket and hat in my car and have yet to put my winter clothes into storage. On the nicer days I make sure I spend as much time outside enjoying the weather as possible.

On a recent warm day we took a trip to Bowood Farms, a local greenhouse. We've been looking into possibly getting a terrarium and we wanted to look at supplies and see if there were any upcoming classes or starter kits. Once inside we realized that we need to do a lot more research before moving forward with the terrarium project so we took the opportunity to wander around the grounds enjoying the sunshine.

We we not alone.

Bowood Farms has a resident house cat. He's as sweet as can be. We never learned his name but he let us sneak in a few pets while he wandered through the herbs. What was his favorite?

Cat Thyme! Sooo cute!

Inside we found loads of tropical plants including this incredible little number.

I had never seen it before and managed to leave without snapping a pic of its ID tag. Isn't it stunning?! I love how alien it looks! Based solely on my limited knowledge of plant life it looks like an annual that could possibly be related to a snap dragon. The petals are really thin and delicate like petunias or morning glory's. Does anyone know what it is? My google searches went nowhere.

I am still knee deep in fleece and fur, but I should have some more progress photos soon as well as this month's giveaway! If you're worried about missing an update follow me on Bloglovin! I have a list of daily blogs that I read spread out across the web and this is a life saver. You create one account and list all of the blogs that you read. It pulls all of them into one stream as soon as they're updated and lets you flip through them like a magazine. I love it!